She discovered writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck and Isabel Allende. ''[Steinbeck's] The Grapes of Wrath had a huge impact on me: to see that stories didn't have to be about fancy people in fancy places; that dirt-poor farmers had as real and significant lives as people in the city,'' she says.Espeseth no longer practises Pentecostalism. ''My mother would say I am not cur